


Lies between wooden slats (open letter to Mom)

by BillyStone



Category: Original Work
Genre: Domestic Violence, Dysfunctional Family, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Self-Esteem Issues, Suicidal Thoughts, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:20:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22704607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BillyStone/pseuds/BillyStone
Summary: When I was a child, I built an entire fortress made of all of my bullshit around me to keep people out. It’s vaste and big. With hundreds of rooms, nooks and crannies, entire fields bearing the oppressing smelling bullshit flowers or the hollow sounds of devastation. There’s even an ocean of bullshit and drama.I built it so well, it took me years to realized I was trapped between those walls, no longer raised to keep people out but to keep me in. I didn’t make a fortress as much as a jailI don’t remember how to be honest now. Not with anyone let alone myself. Maybe I’ve never been.There’s an ocean of sorrow inside me.I don’t hate life Mom, it’s something inside of me that I can’t stand.
Kudos: 4





	Lies between wooden slats (open letter to Mom)

**Author's Note:**

> Good evening to you all,
> 
> Lately I've been getting back into writing, mostly experimental pieces. This one is special, more ripped from me by force than choice. I hesitated when it came to posting it at first, because it's kind of disturbing and a first person narration which I never do, but then I decided to share it with whatever bored soul ends up here. Because why not?  
> I wanted at first to apply more context, maybe insert it in a more structured narration but since it deals with mental health issue, the out of nowhere shtick seduced me. It's kind of coming from a book I'm currently working on, but at the same it's a bt of a cathartic work.  
> This is weird, be warned.  
> Be mindful of the tags, too. It's pretty heavy shit and I wouldn't want to trigger anyone. See ends note for more info.
> 
> English is not my first language so don't hesitate to point out spelling or grammatical errors. I also threw a few french words in it, whose sonority I like and because why not. If you want the translation, let me know.
> 
> Enjoy!

**Lies between wooden slats**

(open letter to Mom)

When I was a child, I built an entire fortress made of all of my bullshit around me to keep people out. It’s _vaste_ and big. With hundreds of rooms, nooks and crannies, entire fields bearing the oppressing smelling bullshit flowers or the hollow sound of devastation. There’s even an ocean of bullshit and drama.  
Years and years of lies and illusions, so well fed they developed a life of their own, independent of my will, or maybe my will is not strong enough. Or maybe it is my will: weak minded child who always knew surrender better than fight. Yeah, maybe I just like it that way. After all, it allows me to play the martyr. Victim and tormentor of my own self, of my body and decrepit mind. Master of manipulations.  
I built it so well, it took me years to realized I was trapped between those walls, no longer raised to keep people out but to keep me in. I can’t get out now. Can’t see over them, blinded, short sighted. I didn’t make a fortress as much as a jail.

I don’t remember how to be honest now. Not with anyone let alone myself. Maybe I’ve never been.

The truth is hiding somewhere, I just can’t seem to find it. Only lies after lies, sometimes truer lies than others, sometimes downright fallacies. So greatly woven and intertwine they sound more real than the truth. Jilted by the light, I’m left haunting these corridors I made with my own hands, or, well, mental hands; pushed left and right by something I created that got bigger than me.  
I may have been its creator but it has become my master. Making me act in ways I can’t understand on a whim, or maybe for reasons I just don’t know how to find. Pushing far from the forefront of my mind undecipherable emotions, feeding me sickly and cowardly thoughts. But since I am my master, and my master are those walls and that estranged will, I must have surrender, willingly became its slave. The literal architect of my own demise, of my own insanity. A tomb _érigée_ in the name of fear while I was still inside my mother’s womb. Maybe that’s why I tried to die before I even took my first gasping breath, which must have sounded like an agonizing fish what with all the born face first and umbilical cord like a noose thing.

I don’t want to, but I still resent her for not letting me. Nothing good can come out of me. All the good came out of her long before me.

Or maybe just before, or maybe she still had some, but so few left she couldn’t spare any for the third child of a destructive union. The one created on a snow storm night, wanted at first but left behind by its male creator before it even imitated a dying fish. The one he wouldn’t claim, except when it could be of use to _colmater_ his own powerlessness and tainted mangled corrupted heart.  
The sick desires that sometimes sprung in my mind is nothing more than a reflection of the look in his eyes he would get sometimes. For what is a child if nothing more nor less than an extension of its father?

I resent him for trying to swallow me whole, for trying to build me in his image and not even succeeding. How hard could it have been to fucking succeed, when he had his hands, his words, his neglect, his voice at disposition? Why couldn’t he have tried harder to obliterate us in the hurricane of his childish violence?  
Why couldn’t have you tried harder, Mom, to melt me and absorb me in your endless fears and insecurities, in your hopeless grasping and needing? Why couldn’t you secure my servitude better with the manipulations of a victim who doesn’t even have the decency of doing it consciously?  
Maybe then I would just be a thing for him and you and the other ones and everyone to use as you see fit. Brainless, for my brain is my blessing and my curse. Maybe then, I still wouldn’t have been human, but at least I would have been yours. Half assed cruelty is worse in my case than full on one, as if you couldn’t even be bothered to put all your efforts in it. It’s insulting.

There’s an ocean of sorrow inside me. If I open my eyes and confront it, trying to see where I am, and if there’s no shore in sight, I might just drown. But that’s the jail talking. I think the reason closer to the truth (but not the truth, never the truth) is this: I’m not scared of drowning for I already am, I just convinced myself I’m not. No, I’m scared of opening my eyes, seeing the shore, and not swimming towards it.

Part of me wishes the ocean was real; then the weight in my lungs would be water slowly suffocating me until nothing’s left to suffocate. Dying having done nothing is easier than living and dying when I have everything. The act of living is the scariest monster of them all.

Sometimes I wake up and it’s like my head is in a fog. Well, not exactly a fog, more like a heavy and constrictive gas; _molasse_. And it’s not just my head. It’s inside my head, but it’s inside and around my whole body. Like I’m swimming in a filthy disgusting pond of grey watery tar. I can’t think. Or I think I can but I actually can’t. Like a _clivage_ between my body and deeper parts of me, and something more superficial. And I think I’m doing okay, denial without intention. I’m not. I haven’t in a long time. I hate myself for that.  
I hate myself for a lot of things.

My skin feels thin, tender and harassed. Like thousands of prickly little insects biting into it. Like my soul is just there, with nothing to protect it, for anyone to see. And inside my head, a dull boom boom boom that sometimes changes into frazzled radio static. Panic, I guess.

Sometimes I feel this weird febrile energy running through my body, scorching my veins, pushing against my skin; as if something was trying to break free by eating me from inside out. Like I’ll just burst open, everything reversed. Here my hollow brittle bones, there my maggot eaten brain; blood everywhere and skin hidden inside.

Here, my black corrupted disgusting poor excuse of a heart. I would give it to anyone if it meant getting rid of it.

My love is not sweet or pure or kind. It’s a tainted mangled ugly monster, wanting to swallow them whole. It would bring nothing but pain and destruction, for it is a violent and fickle thing. And when it is soft, it’s too twisted by all the insecurities and the endless needs to do any good.  
Yet, I wish for someone to whom I could dedicate all my anguish. Someone who would go to hell and back and heaven and anywhere for me, suffer all kind of torture just for a moment at my side, just for the honour of touching my skin. Someone for whom I would shoulder all the horrors in the world just for a second of touching theirs. But there’s no one, and anyway, I know I should first and foremost focus on loving myself. I can’t though, I don’t want to. Or maybe I am, and my love is spreading through my flesh like an infection. Cut it out, get rid of it for me. My kingdom for a single night of peace on the inside. My life to be free of this abomination.

Maybe romance is the curse of French writers, even if we haven’t been French for very long. We, us; from everywhere and from nowhere. Secrets in the family hidden behind nasty words and nasty touches, gift wrapped in perverted violence. Hooded eyes, every last one of us, cloudy eyes, except the younger ones. Seeing of the world only the muted images we created in our heads. Time waits for no one, yet I do not hear the ticking of seconds passing by anymore.

Here, here, hear me. I cry for my punishment, for good things should not befall the undeserving ones. Make me pay the price so I can finally stop punishing myself. Crush me under your shoe, so I can atone for my oh so numerous sins. Take me from that stilled motion and trust me into chaos once more. Take my shapeless and worthless form and bend it to your will, clean me. Until I become something great, something pure.

I don’t know how to deal with gentleness and outside peace; it makes me uneasy. Makes me miss the good old fucking days. Aggressiveness comes so much more easily to me than kindness. I want to rip my eyes out for that, so I can’t see the pain and disappointment in all of your healing or aging faces.

Mom, I wish I could hide in your arms like I used to. But even back then, the equation of a hug plus you equals peace and security never worked.

A friend of mine told me to speak slower, to stop running from my words. But it’s not my words I’m running from, or not only. It’s from me, and the mess inside my head. There’s a war going on in there, and I only know how to survive by ignoring it half the time and lying all the time. I don’t know how I feel, I don’t know what I want. And when I do, questions come and I’m left wandering left and right and in circle, doubting, was it the good choice? As if good or bad are such distinct thing, set in marble and clearly defined. And when I wonder what is just for me – I wanna die I wanna die, I don’t wanna be here and even if I do I don’t fucking know how. Mom, Mom, fix me. Why can’t you just fix me? How am I supposed to handle myself when you were never able to? When you never showed me how? I don’t know what to do with my brain, my body, any of it. I want to get better, I swear I’m trying, it’s just not fucking working. When I know what steps to take, I just don’t know how to take them.  
Bullshit, bullshit. You know how: you just take them. It’s not that you don’t know, it’s that you don’t want to, don’t have the courage to.

I just don’t fucking know why I don’t want to. Maybe I’m just a coward. Maybe I like inertia better than movement, always more a creature of death than life. When life comes, it makes me want to rip myself apart. To take my fraying edges and those of the world and just fucking tear at them, until there’s nothing left. I don’t have the words, I don’t have the words, I need to learn them. How else am I supposed to understand, to make people understand.  
I’m not well, I don’t remember ever having been well. I feel so fucking weak for thinking that. Looking down on myself because people with much worst life fight and rise every day and I, whose life was hard but not the worst, just can’t seem to get my fucking shit together. To gather all the pieces, make something human looking, throw it out there and make it move like it’s supposed to move. Am I really human if I can’t act like one? There’s something broken inside, something twisted and monstrous, something so sad it can’t breathe; and I don’t fucking know why. I want to erase it, I want to erase me.  
I think too much. I lack discernment. I lack so many things.

I wish I was more, I could have been more, I can still be. Life has given me everything for it. I just don’t want to. I want to lay in my bed and fucking die. Even when I don’t want to, even when I try to make something of myself, it still there; white noises in the background. My own sweet lullaby. And all those words, all those words Mom, and all these sensations on and in my skin –

Maybe I’m just lazy. Not putting in the effort necessary for – well, for anything really. Maybe life has been too easy on me, too soft. I want the suffering, the marks on my skin to explain all this. But the only marks I have are the ones I cut there. Illegitimate pain, bastard position in life. I feel like I’ve lost something before I was even born and I can’t figure out what it was. I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind. Nothing feels real, nothing ever has. There’s something inside me longing for… something, someone, I don’t know. I just know the longing. And I’m waiting like a stupid piece of shit, when I have all the tools to live.

Maybe that’s what I lost in my mother’s womb. The will to live, that primal movement. Or maybe she never gave it to me. Maybe all she gave was that black turbid rage, the forever hungry pain, the placid passivity and stained skin. Or maybe she gave me love, and even as a foetus, all I gave back was the sickness inside of me.

I look into the mirror and I think, this is it, this is you. But nothing in the face looking back at me looks like me. Except the empty eyes. Brown like shit. If I’ve had blue or green eyes, maybe I would have been magnificent too.

Anyway, when I’m febrile, I both want to run – run run run run run run run, anywhere, everywhere, as long as it’s far away from me – and destroy everything. Mainly me. My brain knows I’m angry, but always, no matter which mood, there’s this slab of ice, this veil, between my emotions and me. I can hardly recognize them half the time. And when I do, either I don’t know what to do with them, or they come and grow and twist and grow grow grow before – poof, nothing. Leaving nothing but emptiness in their wake. Eruption to oblivion; that change leaves me breathless and nauseous.

On the subject of destruction, I’ve always been a good storyteller. Oh, well, maybe not storyteller but story writer. That how I was able to build my gorgeous fortress. But you, Oh Mom, you’re the one I learnt it all from. Roof of delusions standing on pillars of lies placed on a nice wooden _parquet_ of illusions. When I catch you lounging in it, trying to hold your little world together, it makes me want to bash your head in. Reflections of each other, it would be just like bashing my own face.

On the subject of bashing heads, when I once told my mother I had dark urges, she asked if I wanted to prostitute myself, letting older men debase me to find my own self worth; projected images of her own unresolved issues. I stayed silent, because I didn’t have the heart to tell her that no, in my darkest fantaisies I wasn’t the victim (liar liar remember those dreams with your father) but the monster. While she thought about selling what little she had left, I longed for the sounds and feel of cutting ribcages wide open and plunging my hands in them. While she pictured being raped, I dreamt about raping teenage boys and girls, men and women.  
Once, the obtrusive thought of raping a child came over me. I felt cold and dirty and like laughing at the injustice of it all. No matter how much I run and how many walls I hide behind, I am the proud descendant of some men in my family.

The dreams of rape stopped after a while, and the one with the child never came back. Nowadays I dream of consensually dominating pitiful men, because them wanting to be belittle and asking for it is even more fun. As for blood and bones, they are a constant presence at the back of my mind. But violence, like all thing, has to be respected. I do not long for war like I’ve seen some of my fellow companions do. War disrespect violence, disrespect everything really. I do not need one to prove my worth or how big my country’s dick is compared to the neighbour country’s one. I already know what I’m worth (quite a bit on good days, nothing on bad ones) and I don’t have a dick. War is a waste of life and of time. Besides, there’s been one waging in my head for years now. A war on the outside would just make my monster come out  
(for even in my castle I do not pretend it wouldn’t and maybe that is the wall)  
and we do not want that to happen. It would break my mother’s soul.

I owe it to you, Mom, the sniveling humanity I harbour in my heart. You are too kind: your cruelty, after all, lays in your kindness. You always had faith and love in people, even when they abused it and used it to use you.  
You’re the main reason why I keep the monster inside, why I never hurt others if I don’t have to. Or, at least, why I try not to. Most of the time.  
You’re the only reason why I didn’t become as cold as these men I studied in criminology. I would have, I wanted to, it would have been easier. But you liked me soft and you loved having hope in the world and in people and in all your children. You still do. So when I became cold, I kept the victim inside me closer than the executioner.

Because of that, I manipulate myself more than others. And when I do play with them, its only to satisfy harmless needs or to guide them on their way. You are my only exception.

I don’t hurt people, I don’t hurt children, but I do hurt you. I am, and always will be, my father’s child. I guess I could not completely clean what he left on me.

It makes me angry, when friends and strangers look at me and see something soft and sweet. It makes me want to rip them apart, bit by bit. For me, for us, for our family, everything is a power play and I will never let anyone dominate me again. If I’m weak, if I’m vulnerable, they’ll abuse it. That’s why I will be soft with the one I care about and sweet with the others. Diabetes is, after all, just another name for a slow and incapacitating death.

And if, deep inside, I’m less mean than I think I am, well, that’s between my jail and I.

Sometimes I’m happy like a child, which means I’m stupid and selfish and too _sensible_. I cried so fucking much back then, then I grew cold and it stopped. But once I began the process of unfreezing my innards, it began showing its mocking head again in the least opportune moment. But it won’t come when I try to. When I tell myself, stop being a fucking pussy and let it out, it stays away. How much more can my body and my mind betray me?

My sister comes to mind when I’m like that. And I remember those three years.  
I smell the stench of urine and the vomit stuck between the floor’s slats. The reflection of the sun on the white bathroom’s walls, filled with the effusive reef of ammoniac.  
I see the kaki green of her sweatshirt clashing with the chalk like quality of her skin, emphasized by the brown wood of the stairs and dancing blue lights.  
I remember her eyes the best – blue blue blue, with a hint of grey, like the sky after a storm. Voids filled with either a whole lot of nothing, or excruciating pain or the manic glee of a child.  
My brother had the same ones, most of the fucking time. With less grey in them, more like a knife made of ice. Same skin tone too. But while she got fatter, he got skinnier. One wonders how much of a difference can slither in between prescriptions and illegal.

Kids, the both of them. Brave kids, just too fucking hurt to be able to function during those years. Nowadays, their eyes are filled with much more life and hope, with the occasional despair. It’s a good sight.

Sometimes I see through my bullshit, but I just use that clairvoyance to beat me harder. I got it all wrong. I should beat myself to get back on my feet and move the fuck on, not to wallow in my own stinking despicable misery even more. But maybe I’m masochistic. Maybe I like it, the suffering. Maybe I’m just too used to it.

You know Mom, half the time I convince myself I don’t even feel it, and then either I don’t feel anything, or what I feel is muted and then I crash and the waterworks begin for a full five seconds before it stops and goes fuck knows where.  
I’m cold Mom. I’m cold and angry because I’m scared. No, scratch that, I’m not scared, I’m terrified. Always have been. Fight, freeze, flight, flirt. Let me give you a tip, the right answers are two and four. Mama, your child is nothing but a cowardly whore who won’t even put out half the time.

You know, lately I’ve been thinking that those boy’s hands on and inside me while I was half asleep and recovering from a panic attack were a blessing. I think that’s what kept me from sharing your dark thoughts and bringing them to life. There, something I’ll only tell you here: you were upstairs when it happened. I kept that detail out when I finally came clean, as a way to justify my weird behaviour and budding food strike. I knew you would not forgive yourself. And no matter how much we both like to break your back, this is not a stick I want to give you.

I guess that like nighty-nine percent of the population I’ve got Daddy Issues. Still, it doesn’t make it less disgusting when I show my belly for approval and attention to men who diminished me in order to fuck and control me.

Don’t worry Mom, I don’t fuck at least a third of them. I don’t fuck a lot, to be honest. Don’t get me started on making love, I don’t know what the fuck that is. I only know how to give my body, never anything else, and how to take from them. Men, boys, girls, women, once you give them sex, they become so easy to manipulate. Sex, and the vulnerability that comes with it, makes people weak. It disgusts me. And love, well, I’ve seen how love can become one’s Master and how it mesmerizes the mind and destroys it. I think I prefer my own master on that one. At least, I’m the only one who knows all about my weaknesses and fragile points in my glorified shell.

A friend of mine called me a black widow. I remember when I fucked that Brazilian dude. There I was, on all four like a bitch in front of him, his hands on my hips. But make no mistake, I fucked him. I remember his “Oh my God, Oh God, Oh God”, while something waring and raging inside of me, like lava in the form of a snake coiling and uncoiling between my hips, was taking something from it. Oh shit, Freudian lapsus, I meant from him.  
I still don’t know what it was. He got scared of me after that, never agreed to fuck again.

Maybe my friend is right. Maybe I’m a black widow. I do want to eat them and spit them out, like used cunts. You see Mama, I’m avenging all the women in our family from whom men took and took and gave nothing in return but pain and humiliation. I’m avenging the men too, hurt by other men or women. I’m not stupid enough to think it goes only one way. I don’t have that luxury, the secrets hiding behind hooded eyes told me as much.

I want to love you Mom, like I can’t love myself. But I can’t help but despise everyone slightly less than I despise the me who is I. Mom, Mom, why have you never given me peace? Why did you never give peace to yourself back then? Why have you never loved yourself before and after? If you had, maybe I would have learnt how to love what you have made, instead of wanting to tear its skin apart.

I feel ungrounded, floating between here and there and no-fucking-where. Adrift in my mind, in my flesh, in my world. Searching desperately for an anchor while not searching at all. Self-sabotaging, because never being enough and never being right and never being clean is what we were taught. We, maybe my siblings and I. We, mostly all the voices under my void, moving through my blood, and all the fragmented pieces inside my soul. Lamenting and crying like a weak willed useless not good enough little _pisseuse_. We are plenty and we are none.  
Identity, creation of the mind over time and bundle of all the stories we tell ourselves. Maybe, if I keep having one foot here and the other some other place, meandering through life, I’ll float away. High above or down below, it’s all the same. I’ll just fade from life as if I was never there to begin with.

I hate myself for thinking that, life is a gift and there are so many beautiful things to see, heart wrenching emotions to feel. Good or bad, painful or sacred, experiences to be had. I see it sometimes (often) the beauty of it all. I honour it in the relative privacy of my mind.

I don’t hate life Mom, it’s something inside of me that I can’t stand.

I laugh easy, I joke easy, I bond with people easy. I even love them, in this unconditional detached kind of way. Humans are as fascinating and stunning as they are hideous and lost. That’s why I’m only half human, Mom, you see? An _esquisse_ of a life that could have been. You didn’t take the time to finish me right, or maybe I was born whole and I let our family cut me in half. Perhaps my other half died in your womb and that’s what I’m looking for.

I do take myself too seriously sometimes, but not all the times. I’m not flat in expressing words or always sad with friends. I can do some of the things human do. But I don’t take care of me right. I don’t live life right. I don’t love them right. I don’t feel right.

I’m crooked, like my walk. Crooked like my mind. Twisted inside. I don’t connect with them, never really, never completely, never honestly. As if there’s a thin indestructible wall between them and me, always. Not just the walls of my bullshit fortress, something older, something even stronger. I don’t work like I’m supposed to Mom, I’m not a good oiled machine. You should have left me in the trash like the broken cups, you should have put me down like mad dogs. What use can I be to you and to the world, when I don’t fucking work right.

I’m tired Mom, always have been. The weight on my chest, it’s a lot of thing, but it’s mostly the weight of my own existence. I can’t bear it, Mama. I don’t have blue or green eyes, I’m not magnificent nor strong like you and my siblings are. I was always the weak one, the crying one. Just because I stopped crying for so long, because I got so cold inside, doesn’t mean I have gotten stronger. My bones are empty and I used what little bravery I had standing up as a kid. It was tough back then, it’s harder now. It’s not that I want to die Mom, I think I just don’t want to live. I’m too scared for that, and I’m beating myself for even thinking that because how pathetic it is? Ungrateful little girl. They gave me stars in my hands and I threw them down the shower drain. They gave me a heart and I left it in the snow. They offered me a body and it has never been mine.

Dissociation, they call it. Depersonalization, they say. Derealization, they explain. Well, fuck you. Those are words, checkboxes, and I’m too big to be put into rectangular cages anymore. It’s just facts, life. Reality is subjective and each person’s creation. Being a person is a myth like the adult myth. Few of us know what the fuck we’re doing, we’re just pretending. Puppets dancing on a scene to a music _propre à chacun_ while for social norm we say we all hear the fucking same. I am the problem but I’m nothing if not a reflection of what surrounds me. As inside, as outside.  
Lying piece of shit.

I don’t hear any music, Mom, and I can’t dance on empty bones.

As for the other one, yeah. Yeah. Maybe I was born like that. Maybe my mother never took notice of it because it would have forced her to see that nothing good had come out of her with me. Perhaps she wonders too, if she deprived me because she had so little left for herself. Perhaps that’s even why she tried to take what little I had, by clutching me like _une peluche_ or making me act like her mom.  
Maybe it came after. Maybe I’m making it up to be more interesting. Who knows, I certainly don’t.

Most of the time, I feel movements inside me (emotions, thoughts, needs) as if I’m under water. They can’t reach me and I can’t reach them. Even the terror, it’s there but it’s not. It’s only when my body shiver and curl up and trash in grey mud that I begin to acknowledge it. I’m here but I’m not. Everything is too loud and too bright but nothing really touches me. I can’t smell, I barely taste. I’m just here. I’m here.

Even when I’m here, I worry I is empty.

Empty though is better than the alternative. The moods where I’m too full and busting at the seams. I hate those. Because I don’t even really realize I’m like that until they’re over. Like a wave going upward that drags me along for a ride, going up up up, and when we are at the apex it’s gone and I’m falling. And then I’m falling forever. I never crash. I wish I would. Maybe it would hurt and there would be nothing left but a puddle of black goo, brain, bones and blood on the pavement. But it would be something, at least. Those moments, suspended in the air, waiting for something that never comes. This, this is my tantalum _supplice_.

Huh, maybe I am being punished after all. Still, I miss the honesty of violence.

I’m going to tell you a secret, Mom. As long as you promise to keep it between us. There are less secrets in the family lately, you see. Still a lot, but not as much,  
(not a lot from me after I discovered I could hurt all of you with my truer lies. Except some. Some of them, I’ll take to my grave. The ones I’ve written down and then destroyed, the one I can’t face and can’t let you know about Mom, because it would break your heart)  
so I thought I would add one of mine. That way, you can keep it behind your misty eyes, in the dark bags under them, close to your warm beating heart.

Hell, this is like the black Friday of our west neighbours, for the price of one, you get four.

  
One. I can’t write in French anymore. Ever since those three years, the French language has eluded me, it has cast me out. It slips between my fingers like my thoughts, and its beauty is kept from me. Like one’s oldest friend who grew tired and decided that leaving was better than bending. Another betrayal, like my body.

  
Two. I would have let dad fuck me if it had meant he would love me more. Sometimes, I think I wanted him to.

  
Three. When I feel alone and I want to think of peace, I remember the golden hue of our old apartment. I remember the laughs and the smell of rank sweat of your sheets. I remember my sister long hair, flowing down her back like velvety volutes of smoke as she was swimming under the water. I remember the green of the leaves and the _beige_ of the trees whose light, along with the one from the sun, were drawn to the crystal blue of my brother’s eyes when I smoked pot for the first time. I remember your pained sweet smile and the warmth left by the sun on your tanned arms when you were wrapping them around me. It makes it hurt even more, but it’s worth it. Something bubbles from my chest to my throat, blinding and wholesome, and this is how I want to love you all the time. From all the thing I carry inside me, this is what I cherish the most.

  
Four. Sometimes I think wanted to fuck you too.

I don’t remember all my stories and not even half of my life, and my bastard and stillborn sense of identity is proof of that. I keep searching for some untold trauma to explain my behaviour. Maybe there are none, except the obvious ones. Maybe I’m just dysfunctional for the sake of it. When have I stopped being ill and became the illness itself? Always, always, something inside murmur. You sully everything you touch, that’s why you don’t like being touched. Not because they contaminate you, but because if you do, then you’re just spreading the disease.

Hahahaha, laugh with me Mom! Isn’t it funny how I spent all the time you gave me self-pitying when you've spent all yours fighting?

I think I'm lost Mom. But maybe, just maybe, if you opened your arms one more time I could find my way back to you. 

Please Mom, just let me rest my head on your breast and bask in that golden glow I've only pretended to have forgotten. Not for long, just a bit, just a few seconds for me to catch my breathe.

I'm tired of running from the thoughts like quicksand in my brain. Hiding from truths which are nothing more than fortress' walls. Living with creatures wearing my face but speaking another tongue. 

I think I'm finally ready for your kindness now. Let us put the past behind and start the clock again.

**Author's Note:**

> If you have read it and come this far, I hope you enjoyed it. And thank you for taking the time.
> 
> Like I said before, it kind of came out of nowhere while taking some elements from my book, so I might come back to it. Maybe not though, because some characters only have a few things to say and then go back to being silent. 
> 
> If you've come to learn more about the possible triggers, here it comes :  
> \- More or less graphic depictions of fantasy centered around torture  
> \- Reference to incest element in a father / daughter relationship, no actual acute description nor rape  
> -Reference to incest element in a mother / daughter relationship, no actual acute description nor rape  
> \- Fantasy about seual assault on adult and once on a child, no actual acute description nor rape  
> \- Implied suicide attempt  
> \- Drug use mentionned but not described  
> \- Alcohol abuse mentionned but not described  
> \- Reference to sexual assault  
> \- Refrence to an unspecified eating disorder  
> \- Implied domestic violence  
> \- Implied psychological violence  
> \- Implied child abuse 
> 
> If I missed one, do not hesitate to let me know.


End file.
